1941 in art

Events from the year 1941 in art.

Events

• March 17 – In Washington, D.C., the National Gallery of Art is officially opened by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
• July 14 – American art collector Peggy Guggenheim and German painter Max Ernst arrive in New York City, fleeing occupied Europe.
• August 12 – The first evacuated paintings from the National Gallery in London are moved to underground storage at a slate quarry beneath Manod Mawr in North Wales.
• October 24 – English artist Brian Stonehouse is captured as a Special Operations Executive agent in France.
• October 31 – Work ceases on sculpting Mount Rushmore National Memorial in the United States, continued by Lincoln Borglum after the death in March of his father Gutzon Borglum.
• December 8 – The exhibition American Negro Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries opens in Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery in New York City.
• December 30 – Peggy Guggenheim marries the exiled Max Ernst in Virginia.
• Ettore DeGrazia's work appears for the first time in Arizona Highways magazine.
• African-American painter Jacob Lawrence completes his Migration Series.
• German-Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon, in hiding in the south of France, begins the autobiographical series of paintings Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel ("Life? or Theater?: A Song-play").
• Indiana University Art Museum established in Bloomington.
• The Art Center in La Jolla established in California.

Awards

• Archibald Prize: William Dargie – Sir James Elder, KBE

Works

• Ansel Adams – Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (photograph)
• Ethel V. Ashton – Defenders of the Wyoming Country 1778 (United States post office mural, Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania)
• Max Beckmann – Double Portrait, Max Beckmann and Quappi
• Peter Belov – 1941 ("Large Stalin and Red Army")
• Paul Cadmus – Aviator
• Paul Delvaux
• The Anxious City
• The Phases of the Moon
• A. E. Doyle and Associates – Loyal B. Stearns Memorial Fountain (Portland, Oregon)
• Sir Russell Drysdale – Moody's pub
• Jacob Epstein – Jacob and the Angel (alabaster sculpture, 1940–1)
• Ivon Hitchens
• Damp Autumn
• Interior, Boy in Bed
• Edward Hopper – Girlie Show
• Marcel Jean – Armoire Surréaliste
• Yousuf Karsh – The Roaring Lion (photographic portrait of Winston Churchill)
• Dame Laura Knight – In For Repairs
• Alonzo Victor Lewis – Dr. Mark A. Matthews (bronze bust, Denny Park (Seattle))
• Musa McKim – ' and Philip Guston – Pulp Wood Logging (murals at Federal Building (Laconia, New Hampshire))
• Roberto Matta
• Composition Abstraite
• Ecouter Vivre
• Foeu
• The Initiation (Origine d’un Extrême)
• Invasion of the Night
• Théorie de l’Arbre
• Paul Nash
• Battle of Britain
• Totes Meer
• John Petts – Alun Lewis
• Pablo Picasso
• Dora Maar au Chat
• Tete de femme (Dora Maar) (sculpture)
• Horace Pippin – Self-portrait
• Albin Polasek – Masaryk Memorial, Chicago
• Victor Vasarely – Untitled
• Carel Weight
• Escape of the Zebra from the Zoo during an Air Raid
• It happened to us – daylight raid